now that the year's almost over, my personal picks for the top ten alt rock tracks of 2005 --

1) emanuel / the willing
2) bloodhound gang / foxtrot uniform charlie kilo
3) nine inch nails / only
4) fall out boy / sugar, we're goin' down
5) beck / e-pro
6) all-american rejects / dirty little secret
7) alkaline trio / mercy me
8) the white stripes / blue orchid
9) the bravery / an honest mistake
10) death cab for cutie / soul meets body

honorable mentions --
gorillaz / feel good, inc.
coheed and cambria / the suffering
QotSA / in my head
SoaD / violent pornography
switchfoot / stars

take all this information and do something useful with it.

--j

everybody's talking about the weather today in north texas. i have to admit it is rather apocalyptic that last saturday we had mid-80s highs, and today our highs are like 30 with a chance of ice and snow. so saturday i went and got my oil changed in shorts, today i come to work bundled up with a hoody, beanie and the jacket i usually ski in. it all reminds me of lewis black's rants about the weather on the white album. go check it out. now.

i won't beat around the bush, some days at work are just fucking work. and i don't mean i'm so busy i don't know how to live my life, i mean sometimes i'm so ridiculously lacking on things to do that i'm privately amazed when i've been here for 8 hours and i can go home. everybody's job has its perks... i realize i've got a great job so i don't complain much but goddamn, being a cube monkey with little to do at times is vicious. there are seriously some days where i would have been so much more productive had i just stayed home and lazed around for 7 and a half hours, and cleaned the bathroom sink for the other half hour. it's frustrating when you're not contributing to any kind of good in society. i feel kinda stupid when i'll bother to get up in the morning (whether i'm coming in for the day at 7am or 10am), drive into work and just surf websites and complete necessary 5-minute tasks a couple times a day.

it's different at a small company. if you don't have that much going on, everybody in the office knows it and something happens because of it. here, there's just too much going on all the time, people are out of town, taking time off, working somewhere else in the huge building, nobody can really keep track of everybody. if you're not that high up on the food chain, people kinda forget you're there.

i value my job too much to ever really screw around that much, but i admit it kinda makes me wonder -- how much could i get away with and still keep my job? could i come in at 9am, take 1 hour lunches and leave at 4 o'clock everyday without anyone ever even noticing? what if i took an hour at a time to catch up with one of my friends in the building, would anybody be looking for me frantically?

it's a double-edged sword -- i don't really wanna be all that important and constantly swamped at this point, but i don't wanna be so damn bored all the time. for somebody like me, it gives me too much time to think. i end up just sitting here and spacing out wishing i was at home doing any number of more entertaining things. it's weird that i actually end up feeling more swamped at home (damn i need to watch this tv show, i should be playing this game, i need to sort through this music to see if it's any good, etc) than i do at work. granted, i'm not the average joe that just goes home and watches whatever's on tv that night from 7-11 and then saunters off to bed after 15 minutes of a good book, but still. the point is i'm more methodical about my hobbies than my job, cuz it's more fulfilling.

this can be a tough time of year in this type of situation though. it's supposed to be a holiday rush, but for me with everybody else around me wrapping things up for the holidays and taking days off, it's more like the holiday crawl.

at least this wasted some time.

--j

as mentioned in my last post, rick & i saw aeon flux last night. i didn't really go in with very high expectations, which was probably the right way to go, but it was actually pretty good. it moves at a quick enough pace to keep you entertained despite throwing seemingly random shit at you. i kinda liked how it didn't go way out of its way to explain everything on screen in more depth, would have made the movie feel a lot more bloated. somewhat faithful to the mid-90s MTV animated series, it felt like they didn't go out of their way to put more dialog in than they had to.

the action scenes weren't as stunning as the matrix or anything, but they were believably done. the art and costume designs were pretty sweet and upped the eye candy factor of the movie. i think charlize theron is incredibly beautiful, but i don't think aeon flux was guilty of trying to fill seats by just exploiting her. in the animated series, aeon's hair was always really impossibly pointy and angular, and they took a good shot at achieving that in the movie.

i'd say if you've never seen the animated series you won't be completely confused or anything, so i'd recommend it if you like stuff like the matrix and equilibrium. good innocent (in that ultraviolent way) fun. 7 out of 10.

--j

alayna and i joined chris & monica to hit up the stars game (our third this year already). against carolina, leading 4-2 going into the 3rd i was pretty much convinced we had it, but we gave up a couple goals and ended up tied. there were some close calls in OT, mostly on the hurricanes end. but time expired so we went to the shootout, the first ever in the AAC. came down to the 3rd round where it was up to modano to end the game with a goal. i didn't realize at the time that modano hadn't actually participated in the 2 previous shootouts we've had this year. he pulled a sweet deke to the left on gerber and got the puck to just barely cross the goal line, sending the place into a frenzy. made the whole game awesome.

rick and i are gonna go check out aeon flux tonight. tried to get robert and hoang to go, but robert never got back to me and hoang was too lazy to even bother with an excuse.

tomorrow night, dinner with yet another friend. it's a social weekend extravaganza. w-o-w.

--j

happy december.

things are slow so far up at work, so i figured i'd do some namedropping to convey what kinds of geeky shit i'm into everyday. expect this to be quite random.

right now i'm listening to the fight club soundtrack, if i had to list my top 5 movie soundtracks (that i can think of at this second), they'd be --

Fight Club [IMDb] (1999)
Magnolia [IMDb] (1999)
Requiem for a Dream [IMDb] (2000)
Ocean's Eleven [IMDb] (2001)
High Fidelity [IMDb] (2000)

i haven't really heard much buzz about last.fm, but i link to my last.fm page on the left of this page. i actually think it's a fantastic idea. there's a great description of how it works on wikipedia. i just like the idea of sharing with the world your own personal music tastes.

you might notice that i link to wikipedia a lot. i've actually grown to kinda rely on it at this point. the idea of an encyclopedia that anyone can edit (within reason) is pretty cool, and it's probably the best site you can get lost in for 2 hours without realizing it. if you ever need to kill any amount of time, check out the wikipedia unusual articles listing, always something entertaining there. if you require more instant entertainment, check out fark or waxy.

that should hold you over for now.

--j